Swimming for dummies
Posted by: Fats in: Wika at Hirap > KatawanTwo days ago, my partner and I finally managed to visit the resort and restaurant farm called “Cambridge” just across our subdivision here in General Santos City. Our target was the pool.
My accomplishment for that day was getting my eyes open under water. 
I can’t swim at all. Although I play around in water, I have an irrational fear of water since I was a teenager, perhaps after the experience of being thrown over by strong waves that jumped behind me while I was standing waist deep in a beach in Cavite or Lingayen, Pangasinan (I cannot remember anymore exactly where it was). Anyway, the feeling of getting your head thrown under water and salt water getting into your nose and mouth, and being in darkness flailing your arms and legs around trying to grab onto something solid, was not a very pleasant one. (A feeling called “drowning”).
However, I have since many months ago, with my partner’s encouragement, decided to learn to overcome this fear and learn to swim. We were too tightwad to enroll in a swimming class so I felt that I could probably learn on my own. Besides, this is probably the best way since the pressure of learning to swim in a swimming class would only reinforce my fear and refusal to learn.
At least once a month, we pay a visit to the public pool at our housing in Quezon City, and for the past 5 months I’ve been observing my body and mind’s behaviour towards the presence of water.
Our landlady is terrified of water and swimming and I can understand what seems to be an irrational behaviour, saying “no” and “no” and “no, no” to each invitation “to swim”, “it’s fun”, “I’ll teach you”, “it’s safe.”
The behaviour is towards the unfamiliar and the (as in my case) unpleasant. So getting used to the water again first is important - knee deep, waist deep or breast deep, whatever one feels comfortable in.
Anyway, after each visit to the pool, the realizions of a water-bound environment build up: when your head is under water, don’t breathe in; when your head is above the water, you can breathe in; it’s easier to float with your head down; if you can see under water (a motivation to open your eyes), it is easier to try to swim towards a target; kicking your legs can help keep afloat and in motion; waving your arms can do a similar thing. So, swimming is simply a synchronization of such logical actions/reactions to a water environment.
According to my auntie’s auntie (who was then around 90 years old), all students were required to learn swimming at the university after the Titanic disaster. When I went to university in the 80s, that was no longer the tradition for a long time, and so I took up tap dancing, social dancing, and camping for physical education instead. The only contact with water there was for drinking, cooking and bathing.
But I do like water a lot despite an earlier bad experience. And I suppose the logic of water is just too obvious to impose an irrational fear and loathing of it. The power of water has its own inacessible logic too, the power to both give life and take life, such that it is easier to accept that expert swimmers who insist on swimming at the beach or sailing off to sea on a Good Friday will drown than it is to accept that our landlady has an irrational fear of water.
Perhaps Tuesday, we’ll go back to Cambridge for swimming. Too bad Lion’s Beach is too dirty. However, Alma told me that it had gotten so much better. The problem really is complicated since the city market is also there. But getting the balance right between human life and the life of the environment has got to be possible without degenerating into fencing off the entire beach area by buying everyone off and building an expensive beach resort. It is possible to get that balance at the individual and small community level as evident in the difference between the careless littering around our housing area in Quezon City and the rather clean environment here in Purok Malakas, Barangay Lagao, in GenSan.
